Celebrations!

Erica and I had a lot to celebrate this past month, and we're happy to report that a successful croquembouche helped us do that!

We started this little projected nearly 2 years ago, when we had just finished a tough 1L year. We thought baking (and blogging) would be a nice remedy to way that law school can make you forget about the other things in life - good food, good friends, and new challenges that don't come in the form of rules and statutes. I'm proud to report, that after 3 years of hard work, Erica and I have officially earned the name sake of our blog - we received our juris doctor degrees on May 14th.*

Thanks to the awesome schedulers at BarBri (the bar review course that most newly minted JDs shell out the big bucks for in order to prepare for the bar exam), some of us had a rockin' three days between graduation and the beginning of class. No rest of the weary, huh? So with one of our days off, Erica and I tackled the Croquembouche, and two bottles of champagne...

I made two crème patissiere the night before - plain vanilla and chocolate espresso. The later was the result of a remnant chocolate espresso bar - divine, but I must say that the espresso bean pieces did NOT like going through the pastry bag. I seem to always make that mistake.

The next day, Erica and I set in on making the pate a choux. Easy enough! Adding the eggs in was a big strange - the dough didn't want to absorb any egg for quite some time, but eventually the gloppy mess yielded to a smooth dough. While we waited to bake, we watched Martha and Rachel Maddow assemble Martha's "famous" croquembouche (honestly, what is that woman not famous for?). Watching Rachel and Martha interact was quite entertaining - neither seemed particularly comfortable, but we were impressed on their ability to switch from pate a choux to politics and back to caramel. We were also impressed by the beautiful sugar cookies that they used to decorate - in a spontaneous move, we threw together a batch as well.

Despite the flat dough, Erica assured me that the pate a choux would eventually poof up. And poof it did! We almost took them out of the oven about 20 minutes early (always turn to the next page in a recipe), but only about 3 or 4 suffered in the process.

Filling the poofs was a bit of challenge (see espresso beans, supra), but we eventually got at least some crème patissiere in each of them.

We were nervous about assembling, particularly given our utter failure with the gingerbread house, but the caramel was so sticky that it proved really easy to assemble. We added some decorations in celebration of graduation (like the blue and gold there?), and then sat down to enjoy with friends.
Looking forward to the next one! (Something savory please? And something that doesn't involve suet? :-))

* Not quite lawyers yet though - over the next two months, I'm sure you'll hear more about our adventures in BarBri and tackling the dreaded CA bar.

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

And the winner is...

We combined this month's challenge with an Oscars party at Erica's house.  Both of us enjoy critiquing red carpet fashion, although we spend most of our time in jeans and t-shirts.  Wasn't Sandra Bullock's dress amazing?  And, we love her, but didn't Meryl Streep kind of look like she was wearing a bathrobe?

Anyway, Erica prepared the caramel and orange segments the night before.  The process was kind of tedious, though the oranges looked pretty.

Despite the multiple blanching steps required, the marmalade was much less trying to make.  It smelled divine, and turned out perfectly.

The pate sablee was one of the easier doughs we've dealt with as Daring Bakers.  The only problem we had was consuming too much of it raw.  However, this is always a problem...

We were a little nervous with our choice of molds.  We used silicone cupcake liners, since that was the best thing we could come up with.  They looked super-cute going into the freezer, all multi-colored with their little cookie tops.

It turned out we had nothing to worry about!  The Tians were a little lumpy and sticky, but ultimately they looked just like they were supposed to.  We especially enjoyed getting a little creative with our caramel sauce designs.  This degree of attractiveness is a fairly rare achievement for us, so we were both very excited!  Our baking usually tastes great, but it doesn't always look too nice.  In fact, the next day when we un-molded a few that had more time in the freezer, they looked 100% perfect.

So we declare these Orange Tians a winner!  Even Sara, who despises cooked fruit to an extreme degree, had a taste and declared them mildly palatable... or at least she liked the cookie part.  And they were a big hit among our usual group of friend-tasters.

The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.

Tiramisu Delight!

Ah, we finally had a complete success. The tiramisu was delicious and beautiful - it's rare that both of those come out in our work. Unfortunately, I think that leads to a much less funny post (no gingerbread prison here....)

Also, no pictures of the marscapone, but was delighted when the very liquid cream miraculously turned into cheese overnight. I had suspected failure, but instead it was spot on.

Next, Erica made the custard - stiring, stiring, stiring.


We were a little confused why we ended up with so many little bowls of similar substances - did anyone else feel that way? Particularly when you just mixed them together in the end?

Next we made the lady fingers. If daring bakers had taught us one thing, it's how to gently fold flour into egg whites.

Our friend Rachel was absolutely delighted to see the final product.


Less clear is how delighted she'll be at us posting this photo. :-)

Till next time!

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Festive Gingerbread Prison

It's been a long December. It's our third year of law school, and it was hard to rally for a fifth semester of exams. So cut us some slack on this one...

On the bright side, the gingerbread came out of the oven in beautiful shape. We had all kinds of ideas and decorations for our gingerbread house. Indeed, those ideas flow well after a few cups of brandy-spiked mulled cider, some beer, and some wine. And the movie Four Christmases. (Do not watch this movie without good doses of holiday spirit and holiday spirits.)

Building gingerbread houses while intoxicated, however? Not a good idea. Clearly. We could blame it on the consistency of the frosting--yes, it was a little bit off--but let's be honest here, folks: the outcome of this challenge had quite a bit to do with our good friend alcohol.

Note the unusual triangular shape. This was because we broke a few of our walls while trying to attach them. (See broken wall at left, with clever circular window). We made up for it with Snocap detailing above our (one) window and (one) door. Another highlight is the the jellybean "stone" path up to the "door," which was a window in our original design. We improvised.

Observe also the delightful open-air "exercise yard" on the side of the gingerbread prison, with candy cane guard posts. Or stripper poles, for this is a happy, festive prison.

And the coup de grace--a Necco wafer roof, with shredded coconut "snow." How beautiful. And lest you fear our gingerbread prison is not secure, don't miss the gumdrop alarm lights going off at the front of the roof.

Turn your eyes from the screen so as not to be blinded by the perfect beauty of this festive gingerbread prison.

PS--No children were traumatized (or involved) in the construction of this challenge.

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

Corageous Cannolis

Sorry we're a bit late on posting this month! While Erica and spent a lovely (and relaxing weekend) down in Big Sur making cannolis in early November, finals have begun to take their toll and posting fell below outlining and writing papers on my to do list. But as procrastination has now set in, here we go....

I must confess, I found this dough rather odd. It smelled of playdough



and was near impossible to roll out. Luckily for us, we had some manly help with both the rolling


and the frying. My mother looked scared when I brought the fire extinguisher into the kitchen "just in case," but after many years of frying fish for Christmas Eve, my father appeared a seasoned pro at frying up the cannolis.


Finding a cannoli mold was a challenge. I looked for them at the store, but the not-so-helpful man at Safeway looked v. confused when I asked where in the baking section I might be able to find one. So we resorted to the traditional method instead and used a sawed off section of dowel. It worked fairly well, though they did smell a bit like cedar.


And out the came! We did get a blistery outside, though I think we should have rolled the dough a bit thinner - these shells were thicker and heavier than cannolis I've had in the past (Erica and I have both lived in Boston, with a pretty high bar set by Mike's Pastries in the North End).

We made both a "traditional" filling


and a seasonal pumpkin filling.

Not quite mini chocolate chips, but pretty enough!


Given that we didn't burn the kitchen down, however, I'll call this one a rousing success! And now, back to the grindstone for two weeks of finals. We'll be back in December, hopefully for a dessert that goes well with eggnog and mulled wine!

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.

Macaron Update

A little update from TV Land. I was just watching the latest episode of Gossip Girl and came across a moment I just had to share. I wish I knew how to link to stolen episodes of GG, but I'm not that tech savvy (and rather afraid of getting caught).

So, Blair and Serena are in a big fight, and Chuck (Blair's BF) schemes to get them stuck in an elevator together so they can make up. What does he leave them as rations? Single Malt and MACARONS from LaDuree! If only that had happened two weeks ago, it would have been so perfect!

Okay, back to reality...

Macarons (not Macaroons)

As big fans of macarons (but not macaroons!), we were both very excited about this Daring Bakers' challenge. After tossing around a few different ideas, we settled on three varieties: orange with Nutella filling (1/4); green tea with Nutella filling (1/4); and vanilla with espresso ganache (1/2). The last variation was an attempt to imitate a macaron from Sara's favorite Parisian bakeshop, Laduree (http://www.laduree.fr/index_en.htm).

[The homemade espresso ganache is in the orange corningware bowl above. And who can resist Nutella?]

While we struggled to obtain many cookies with perfect "feet," we generally felt proud of our results. And all of the varieties were absolutely delicious!


We used orange zest to flavor the orange cookies, which caused them to be a little too wet, though wonderfully flavorful. Since we couldn't find green tea powder at the grocery store, we just ground up green tea leaves in a spice grinder. While this was effective, the flavor was quite faint. Scraped vanilla bean served to flavor the vanilla cookies deliciously.


Sara and I are both Gossip Girl (http://www.cwtv.com/shows/gossip-girl) junkies, and we enjoyed an episode as we assembled our macarons. Above you can see the evil Blair Waldorf rising out of the bowl of espresso ganache.


The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

The espresso ganache recipe is by Rose Levy Beranbaum, and is from the September 1998 issue of Food and Wine. It is available at http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/espresso-ganache.